Reflections on War and Peace

WHICH IS THE NORM: PEACE OR WAR?

"Most of the [great writers who founded international law] thought that mankind had started from a condition of innocent peace. It was man's depravity which had interrupted this state and had produced virtually universal and unceasing war. There can be no question that this proposition reverses the truth. It is not peace which was natural and primitive and old, but rather war. War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention. Our intelligence is only just beginning to enable us to penetrate the clouds which rest on the farther verge of history, but what does seem clear to trained observation is the universal belligerency of primitive mankind."

--Henry Maine, "International Law" (1887)

"There is little to suggest that [Henry Maine] was wrong. Archaeological, anthropological, as well as all surviving documentary evidence indicates that war, armed conflict between organized political groups, has been the universal norm in human history...Rousseau may have been right in suggesting that men in a mythical state of nature were timid, and only became warlike when they entered into social relations; but social relations were necessary for survival."

--Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (2000), p. 1.

"Peace may or may not be 'a modern invention' but it is certainly a far more complex affair than war. Hobbes bleakly defined it as a period when war was neither imminent nor actually being fought, but [a]t best this is what is usually defined as negative peace. Often it is the best that people can get, and they are duly thankful for it. But peace as generally understood today involves much more than this. Positive peace implies a social and political ordering of society that is generally accepted as just. The creation of such an order may take generations to achieve, and social dynamics may then destroy it within a few decades. Paradoxically, war may be an intrinsic part of that order...Indeed throughout most of human history it has been accepted as such. The peace invented by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, an international order in which war plays no part, had been a common enough aspiration for visionaries throughout history, but it had been regarded by political leaders as a practicable or indeed desirable goal only during the past two hundred years."

--Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (2000), p. 2.

"At all times, amid truculent wars ever reviving, there are signs of a conscious effort to prevent war or to mitigate it. Man has never been so fer'ocious, or so stupid, as to submit to such an evil as war without some kind of effort to prevent it. It is not always easy to read the tokens of his desire and endeavour to obviate war or to diminish its cruelties; it takes some time to interpret these signs; but when attention is directed to them they are quite unmistakable. The number of ancient institutions which bear the marks of a design to stand in the way of war, and to provide an alternative to it, is exceedingly great.

"...among the tribal groups of which society was primitively or anciently made up, the observance of good faith seems to have been more strict than among individuals. There is some evidence of want of respect for sanctity of agreement among individuals, but not so amid tribes. The ancient monuments which are open to us no doubt generally recount victories and defeats, but they also record treaties. Treaties of great complexity and antiquity are found among the surviving savages. Also we have a glimpse of systems of what would now be called International Law; that is to say of rules enforced with a regular ceremonial by trained official agents. Such was the jus fetiale of the Romans. And it is to be noted that there are certain departments of this law in which stricter provision teeny to have been made than were at the outset found in modern days in what is technically called the Law of Nations; for example, the extremely express and severe rules which regulate declarations of war."

--Henry Maine, "International Law" (1887)

THE NATURE OF PEACE AND WAR

"If you want peace, prepare for war."

"If you want peace, work for justice."

--Pope Paul VI

"True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice."

--Jane Addams

"If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies."

--Moshe Dayan

"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."

--Albert Einstein

"The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace."

--Alexander Hamilton

"Between individuals, as between nations, peace means respect for the rights of others."

--Benito Juarez

"If peace cannot be maintained with honor, it is no longer peace."

--Lord John Russell (1853)

"Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice."

--Harry S. Truman

WHAT DOES WAR DO TO THE WARRIOR?

"[Many warriors] are united by a common discovery: that man may remain captain of his soul...despite the worst of all ordeals with which life can confront him. Battle is that experience. Much also in life is terrible and terrifying...But in no other circumstances than the battlefield does man confront the knowledge that he is present [there] for the purpose of suffering death at the hands of fellow man, and that he must kill if he is not to be killed himself. The battlefield, in short, is a place almost without mercy and utterly without pity, where the emotions which humanity cultivates and admires elsewhere--gentleness, compassion, tolerance, amity--have neither room to operate nor place to exist.

"And yet it is clear that [warriors] are not merely men of blood and iron. Warm, generous and unselfish emotions are at play within them, emotions of friendship, concern for others, loyalty, responsibility. It is not hatred for the enemy or even a blind urge to personal survival that animates [many] of them, but a sense of involvement in the strange masculine society that battle calls into being, and a commitment to the ends for which battle is fought.

"Battle enlarges both of them, making each in a curious fashion not less but more human. [Many of them testify to] how the perception of intense and circumambient danger, which would normally compel a human being to flight or paralysed inactivity, actually seems to heighten energy and function, driving those who feel its effect to overcome its source not by passive surrender to their anxieties...but by positive and physical reaction."

--John Keegan and Richard Holmes, Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle (1985), pp. 19, 21

WHAT DOES WAR DO TO SOCIETY?

"While destructive, war is a generative force like no other. Little in human existence goes untouched by it. As a maker, breaker, and transformer of politics, society, economy, and culture, it is almost beyond comparison, occupying historic junctures and switchpoints to an extent and in ways quite unlike any other social activity."

--Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, "Absent War Studies?" The Changing Character

of War, ed. Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (2011), p. 524.

"When I saw photographs of children, murdered by fascists [in the Spanish Civil War], I felt furious pity. When the supporters of Franco talked of [similar atrocities by the fascists' opponents], I merely felt indignant that people should tell such lies. In the first case I saw corpses, in the second only words."

--Stephen Spender, quoted in Sissela Bok, A Strategy for Peace (1989), p. 9.

"The leaders of the Enlightenment--the philosophes in France, the Publizisten in Germany, the Scottish academics, the English Non-conformists--were not only independent of the ruling trinity of the ancient regime--

monarchy, church, and aristocracy--but subversive of its entire culture. They saw war not as part of the natural order or a necessary instrument of state power, but as a foolish anachronism, perpetuated only by those who enjoyed or profited by it. Their pacifist sentiment was fuelled not so much by humanitarian revulsion and war-weariness--few of them had any direct experience of war--as by the perception that war was part of an entire social system from which they wished to dissociate themselves and hoped ultimately to destroy.

"...[The philosophes and] the bourgeoisie [of their day regarded] war simply as an activity waged by monarchs, aristocrats and the sweepings of society for their own enjoyment and advantage; one not only remote from civilized people, but entirely unnecessary, and one that would inevitably disappear as the rule of reason extended its sway."

--Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (2000), pp. 26, 27.

WHY WAR? WHAT GOOD DOES IT DO?

"War is...an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

"...Force--that is, physical force...is the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object. To secure that object we must render the enemy powerless; and that, in theory, is the true aim of warfare. That aim takes the place of the object, discarding it as something not actually part of war itself."

--Clausewitz, On War (1976 Howard and Paret translation), p. 75.

"Peace is produced by war."

--Pierre Corneille,

"An unjust peace is better than a just war."

--Cicero

"A bad peace is even worse than war."

--Tacitus

"War may end up as a chaotic state of affairs but it starts for reasons. It happens because human groups believe that by resorting to armed force they can gain advantage, or at least prevent disadvantage...The temptation of war...lies in the possibility of a decisive shift in the balance of power sufficient to affect all future transactions involving the belligerents, and also possibly a wider range of political relationships as others are obliged to acknowledge the strength of the victor."

--Lawrence Freedman, "Defining War," Oxford Handbook of War (2012), pp. 21-2.

[Insert quote by Machiavelli about introducing a lion into the city]

"If I were to buy a revolver costing several pounds, in order to shoot my friend with a view to stealing sixpence out of his pocket, I should be thought neither very wise nor very virtuous. But if I can get sixty-five million accomplices to join me in this criminal absurdity, I become one of a great and glorious nation, nobly sacrificing the cost of my revolver, perhaps even my life, in order to secure the sixpence for the honour of my country. Historians, who are almost invariably sycophants, will praise me and my accomplices if we are successful, and say that we are worthy successors of the heroes who overthrew the might of Imperial Rome. But if my opponents are victorious, if their sixpences are defended at the cost of many pounds each and the lives of a large proportion of the population, then historians will call me a brigand (as I am), and praise the spirit and

self-sacrifice of those who resisted me."

--Bertrand Russell, "War as an Institution," Principles of Social Reconstruction (1919 [1916]), p. 108.

"War is a racket. It always has been.

"It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

"A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes...

"Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

"And what is this bill?

"This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.....

"To save [our 1930s] China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war -- a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

"Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit -- fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

"Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.

"But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

"What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

"Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

"Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became 'internationally minded.' We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about 'entangling alliances.' We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.

"It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people -- who do not profit. "

--Major General Smedley Butler, US Marine Corps, War Is a Racket (1935), ch. 1.

"[W]ar [is ubiquitous] in human history. 'Peace', the idea of a social order from which war is abolished, is a relatively recent invention. Even so, 'peace' managed to more or less banish war from social and political thought...many Enlightenment thinkers understood civilization as a...process through which violence--barbarous, rude, uncivil--was being removed from society. Alternatively, as for some eighteenth-century theories, war was

a pathology generated by the politics of [mercantilist] commercial competition between states, to be avoided by restructuring commerce [on free-trade lines]."

--Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, "Absent War Studies?" The Changing Character of War, ed.

Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (2011), p. 526.

WHAT ARE WAR'S COSTS?

Milton Leitenberg estimates that the number of people worldwide killed in wars between September 1945 and 2000, either by combat, by war-related disease, or by war-related famine, is 41 million.

"I hate that drum's discordant sound,

Parading round, and round, and round;

To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,

And lures from cities and from fields...

I hate that drum's discordant sound,

Parading round, and round, and round;

To me it talks of ravaged plains,

And burning towns and ruined swains,

And mangled limbs, and dying groans,

And widows' tears, and orphans' moans;

And all that Misery's hand bestows,

To fill the catalogue of human woes."

--John Scott of Amwell (1730-1783), The Drum

"...If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues--

My friend you would not tell us with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori."

--Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum est" (1917-1918)

"The warring state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual man. It practices not only the accepted stratagems, but also deliberate lying and deception against the enemy;...[It maintains] an excess of secrecy, and a censorship of news and expressions of opinion that renders the spirits of those thus intellectually oppressed defenseless against every unfavorable turn of events and every sinister rumor. It absolves itself from the guarantees and contracts it had formed with other states, and makes unabashed confession of its rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual is then called upon to sanction in the name of patriotism."

--Sigmund Freud, "Reflections upon War and Death," quoted in Sissela Bok, A Strategy for Peace (1989),

p. 11

WHO FIGHTS?

"War is not a relation of man to man, but a relation between state and state, in which the warring individuals are only enemies by accident, not as men, not even as citizens; but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders."

--Rousseau, On the Social Contract, Bk I, ch. 4.

"Wars are not fought by states, but by men and women...a crime against a state is also a crime against its citizens."

--David Luban, "Just War and Human Rights," Philosophy & Public Affairs 9 (1980): 160-181, p.

166

"Warfare, unlike ordinary criminal activity, is not an activity in which individuals engage qua individuals or as members of voluntary associations. They enter into war as members of nations. It is more proper to say that the nation is at war than that its soldiers are at war. This does not, of course, entail that individuals have no moral responsibility for their acts in war. But it does suggest that moral responsibility may not be distributed between combatant and noncombatant in the same way as between a criminal and his children. Many of the men who are soldiers...would not be engaged in military operations at all if they did not happen to be citizens of a warring nation. But noncombatants are citizens of warring nations in exactly the same sense as are soldiers."

--George I. Mavrodes, "Conventions and the Morality of War," Philosophy & Public

Affairs 4 (1975): 117-131, p. 123

"[W]ar between nations is war between their citizens."

--U. S. Supreme Court, Sutherland, Alien Property Custodian v. Mayer (1926), 271 US 372.

Quoted in Ingrid Detter, The Law of War (2000), p. 4.

"Many writers have perceived the role of the civilian as having changed fundamentally at one stage or another in the past few centuries. Raymond Aron, in the opening paragraph of his famous 1954 book, The century of total war, asserted that 'the soldier and the citizen have become interchangeable'. This view was no doubt based on the events of the Second World War, in which the public in many countries was deeply involved in war production, was often directly targeted by belligerents, and sometimes participated in armed resistance movements. It also reflected the fact that during the Cold War civilians on both sides of the Iron Curtain had the doubtful honour of the being nuclear hostages."

--Adam Roberts, "The Civilian in Modern War," The Changing Character of War, ed. Hew

Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (2011), p. 358.

"Undeniably, the classical idea of limited just war, which respects the distinction between combatants and the civil population, has been seriously at odds with the emergence of popular mass armies since the French Revolution. During the era of absolute monarchies the case was clear: war was fought between sovereigns and their agents, while the remainder of the population enjoyed non-combatant immunity. But since armies have

become popular and national, the belligerent parties can no longer been seen as the agents of [a monarchical] sovereign. The national army of a popular state is nothing other than the will of the sovereign people. There is a relation between the totality of war and something that can be labeled popular sovereignty, and that relationship comes very close to the concept of democracy."

--Thomas Hippler, "Democracy and War in the Strategic Thought of Giulio Douhet," The

Changing Character of War, ed. Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (2011), p. 169.

"[In 2011, in liberal societies an] older view of war as a clash between national collectives, mobilized societies, and conflicting communal wills is increasingly giving way to a view of the enemy population as detached from its political leadership and as possessing rights of immunity from collective pressure. These rights are often interpreted as covering not only civilian life but also civilian well-being and dual-function civilian-strategic

infrastructures."

--Azar Gat, "The Changing Character of War," The Changing Character of War, ed. Hew

Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (2011), p. 37.

"Whenever a numerous band believes they have the right to resist the sovereign, and take up arms against the state, war must be understood to obtain between them in the same manner as between two nations."

--Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations iii 3 c. 5, s. 70. Quoted in Ingrid Detter, The

Law of War (2000), p. 4.

WHY DOES THE POPULACE SUPPORT WAR?

"[It] is always a simple matter [for political leaders] to drag the people along [to war], whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship...the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any

country."

--Hermann Goering, in conversation with Gustave Gilbert, 18 April 1946 (Gilbert,

Nuremberg Diary (1961))

"Besides the conscious and deliberate forces leading to war, there are the inarticulate feelings of common men, which, in most civilized countries, are always ready to burst into war fever at the bidding of statesmen. If peace is to be secure, the readiness to catch war fever must be somehow diminished. Whoever wishes to succeed in this must first understand what war fever is and why it arises.

"[Men desire three things, among others:] first, an activity which calls fully into play the faculties in which they feel that they excel; secondly, the sense of successfully overcoming resistance; thirdly, the respect of others on account of their success...But [most] men cannot achieve...by their individual efforts,...the sense of greatness or the triumph of strong resistance overcome...[They seek, above all else, security in their life, possessions, and social standing]. But security, once achieved, brings...ennui...[To the ordinary man, suffering ennui] the realization comes, in some moment of sudden crisis, that he belongs to a nation, that his nation may take risks, may engage in difficult enterprises, enjoy the hot passion of doubtful combat, stimulate adventure and imagination by military expeditions to [exotic locales]. What his nation does, in some sense, he does; what his nation suffers, he suffers. The long years of private caution are avenged by a wild plunge into public madness. All the horrid duties of thrift and order and care which he has learnt to fulfill in private are thought not to apply to public affairs: it is patriotic and noble to be reckless for the nation, thought it would be wicked to be reckless for oneself. The old primitive passions, which civilization has denied, surge up all the stronger for repression. In a moment imagination and instinct travel back through the centuries, and the wild man of the woods emerges from the mental prison in which he has been confined. This is the deeper part of the psychology of the war fever."

--Bertrand Russell, "War as an Institution," Principles of Social Reconstruction (1919 [1916]), pp.

88-90.

WHAT NORMS HAVE GOVERNED THE SEARCH FOR PEACE AND WORLD ORDER?

"War, it has rightly been said, starts in the minds of men, but so does peace. For some people--perhaps for most--any order is acceptable so long as their expectations are met, and for most of human history these expectations have been very basic. This majority will be little concerned about injustice to others, if indeed they ever hear about it. For them peace is what they have got, and they want to preserve it. There will always be a

minority, however small, aware of the imperfections of their societies as measured by standards of divine or natural justice, but such awareness usually demands an exceptional degree of education, leisure and independence...[Some of these will come to think that] the oppressions and shortcomings of the existing order rendered it so unjust and illegitimate that both internal rebellion and external war against it was justified. For

them, peace could come about only through the creation of a new order. Throughout human history man has been divided between those who believe that peace must be preserved, and those who believe that it must be attained."

--Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (2000), pp. 5, 6.

"Men, [Kant] believed, were built out of 'crooked timber', out of which nothing straight [was ever] made. He agreed with his contemporaries [the Enlightenment philosophes] that the immediate problem [in achieving peace] was that presented by the dominance of monarcho-aristocratic regimes for whom war was a natural and enjoyable way of life, and that the first step towards establishing peace should therefore be the establishment of what he called 'republican' states; not necessarily states where the monarchy had been overthrown, but where constitutions ensured that, before war was declared, there should be consultation with the people who would have to pay for it and fight it. But this, though necessary, would not in itself be a sufficient guarantee of peace. War would still continue, warned Kant. But gradually its growing horror and expense would disincline peoples from waging it, and ultimately compel them to abandon the anarchical condition that prevailed among states and enter instead a 'league of nations', which would provide collectively the security that at present each sought individually. Further, all states should provide 'hospitality' for each other's citizens, a measure that would gradually create a sense of cosmopolitan community. The process would be a long one, with many setbacks; but what Kant called 'a seed of enlightenment' would survive all disasters, and ensure that progress would continue to the desired end. However improbable such an end might seem, he insisted, 'it is our duty to act according to the idea of such an end (which reason commands] even if there is not the least probability that it can be achieved'. It was a moral imperative to strive for peace, however remote might be the hopes of attaining it.

"So if anyone could be said to have invented peace as more than a mere pious aspiration, it was Kant. He was almost alone in understanding that the demolition of the military structures built up in Europe over the past millennium would be no more than a preliminary clearing of the ground. New foundations would then have to be laid: peace had to be established. Its ultimate consummation would take a very long time, if indeed it ever occurred at all. Mankind was only at the beginning of what today we would term a very long 'peace process'. The fact that this process was to be ushered in by the most violent wars that Europe had seen for nearly two centuries would not have surprised Kant in the least."

--Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (2000), pp. 30, 31.

"The ruling philosophy of the generation that established the independence of the United States was the very quintessence of the Enlightenment, with its belief in the rights and perfectibility of man and his capacity for peaceful self-government once the artificial l barriers to his freedom--monarchy, aristocracy and established church--had been destroyed.

"It should, however, be noted that this optimistic American ecumenicism, which was to provide the basis for the peace movement of the nineteenth century, was largely limited to the north-east of the United States. Further west and south, the experience of settlement, frontier defence and territorial extension was producing a war culture that owed nothing to an aristocratic feudal past and everything to the violent conditions of a frontier society. The heroic myths and imagery of the Wild West, as recreated in countless films, were eventually to dominate the American mind as strongly as had the myths of the Nordic sagas, the culture of the Norsemen, and the chansons de geste the mind of feudal Europe. It assumed no progress towards a peaceful global society, but a continual struggle in which the use of violence was justified by individual conscience and brute necessity rather than any sanction by church or State. It was understandably parochial, since keeping order within the parish left little time for wider consideration of global organization. A century or so later, when global organization began to appear possible and necessary, the image that came to many American minds was not that of balancing power between states, but of protecting law and order against its disturbers; the protection to be provided by a sheriff with his posse comitatus. If human corruption and inefficiency made this impossible, it must be provided by the efforts of a few good men following the dictates of a moral law within. This American populist belligerence, termed by some historians 'Jacksonian' after the first demotic president of the United States, sat uneasily with the ironical aspirations of the 'Jeffersonian' oligarchy, but it was long to outlive the feudal warrior culture of the Europeans."

--Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (2000), pp. 28, 29.

"In France and Britain [after World War I], wartime resentments were still too deep for the electorates...to regard Germany as an acceptable partner in making the peace. The Germans themselves...were resentful but not impotent, revisionist with the latent power to bring about a revision. The United States Congress was unready to accept any responsibilities as a member of the world community Wilson was trying to create, while the Russians turned their backs on it altogether. French statesmen, deeply skeptical of Anglo-Saxon liberal idealism, sought security by traditional means and tried to check German power by alliances...But in any case, French public opinion would accept no serious military commitment to these allies. As for the British, where a war-weary public opinion was hostile to any European involvement, a liberal policy of conciliating Germany and preserving peace by appeasing her grievances became common ground for all political parties. When it came to the point, no democratic state was prepared to maintain the armed forces needed to support either an international order based on a traditional balance of power, or a rule of law under the auspices of the League of Nations."

--Howard, The Invention of Peace, pp. 66, 67.

"Fascism, or rather national socialism, was to flourish most prolifically in postwar Germany, where the Movement...virtually replaced a traditional nationalism now associated with defeat or betrayal. [Fascism's] concept of order was hegemonial and hierarchic, but the very term 'order' is too static to describe Nazi objectives accurately. The order was that of an army on the march. What mattered was the Movement itself rather than the goal: the struggle was its own justification. [Hitler's] world vision...was one of a hegemony kept on its toes by continual conflict, a caricature of a Roman empire in which the rest of the world consisted either of subordinated associates or barbarian enemies. Peace did not exist in the fascist vocabulary, except as a term of mockery or abuse. Fascists regarded war not just as an instrument of policy but as a thoroughly desirable activity in itself."

"...When war came in 1939, the brilliant campaigns of 1940 seemed to settle the matter...Hitler's prophecy of a thousand-year Reich seemed only a hyperbolic exaggeration of what Europe had now to expect. But there was no prospect of this being a peaceful order. In Hitler's programme, the subjugation of Western Europe was only a preliminary to the conquest of the Soviet Union to make possible the creation of a self-sufficient and racially pure Reich capable of holding its own against the rest of the world. Beyond that, Hitler was already making preparations for war with the United States. For him, war was not simply an instrument for creating a new order: it was the new order."

--Howard, The Invention of Peace, pp. 68, 71

WHAT NORMS HAVE GOVERNED WAR?

"The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring a thousand non-combatants a week [in the Vietnam War], while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one."

--Robert S. McNamara, quoted in Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," Crises of the Republic (1972), p. 2.

"The forty-odd years of European peace that followed [the Franco-Prussian War of 1871] were not disrupted by the virtually continuous, low-level warfare being fought in Asia, Africa and North America to extend the area of European hegemony. This was driven by many factors other than the search for raw materials and markets which socialist economists saw as their principal cause. For the nationalist [Europeans], it enhanced the greatness of their nation. For the conservatives, it provided employment for members of the old landed classes and useful practice for their armed forces. For the liberals, it was a mission civilisatrice and thus a moral duty. The disparity in standard of living between the West and the outside world that so hugely increased with the industrialization of Europe and the United States added to the 'white' man's sense of moral superiority, as well as providing him with the weapons and logistics that made expansion ever easier. A total lack of empathy and understanding of alien cultures, except on the part of a few specialists, made the conduct of colonial warfare all the more brutal. Massacres that were unthinkable in nineteenth-century (though not, alas, twentieth-century) Europe were taken for granted in the pacification of the extra-European world."

--Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (2000), 50, 51.

"On the Russian front...Hitler was fighting a kind of war that had not been seen in Europe for around a thousand years; one not simply for the defeat, but for the virtual annihilation of his adversary. His ultimate object was to destroy the Soviet Union as a political entity, occupy the territory of European Russia and colonize it with German peasantry to balance what he regarded as the over-industrialization of the homeland. This would of course involve the elimination of the Jews, in implementation of his belief in the need for racial purity as the basis for a healthy society. In Hitler's view, this programme was no different from the way in which the Europeans had subjugated or eliminated the indigenous inhabitants of the American and Australasian continents, and there are certainly sinister similarities. But the Soviet Union [fought] back with modern weapons on a scale that Germany could not match. In addition, the inhabitants of the overrun territories reacted to occupation with ferocious guerrilla warfare, which in the eyes of the Germans legitimized their own policy of annihilation. Simultaneously, such warfare was being waged in the Balkan peninsula, whose people had long experience of this sort of fighting against the Turks. Partisan warfare, as it came to be called, was not the least important legacy that the Second World War, like the Napoleonic Wars, would leave to posterity."

--Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (2000), pp. 72, 73.

"[The Catholic Church] at the decline and fall of the Roman Empire had to solve the problem of reconciling the doctrine of a divine order, in which all differences were reconciled and to which the concept of peace was basic, with the reality of a war-torn world in which its very survival depended on the protection and favour of successful warlords. The solution had been found by St Augustine in the fourth century. War, he taught, had to be

accepted as part of the fallen condition of man, who was simultaneously a citizen of the City of God and of a worldly kingdom which, with all its imperfection, played an essential part in the divine purpose and could therefore rightly impose its own obligations. War against the enemies of Christendom itself was entirely justifiable--the Old Testament provided plentiful justification and guidance as to how to wage it--and even intramural war within Christendom had to be accepted as part of mankind's fallen condition. The latter, however, was intrinsically sinful, and clear limitations were imposed on its conduct. These limitations were refined down the centuries. War had to be waged under a proper authority and as a last resort; to right a wrong; and do no more damage than was essential to the achievement of its purpose. Basically, [just] war had the function of upholding or restoring the secular order sanctified by the Church; an order that provided peace, justice and protection that for all Christians. Those who fought were serving God's purpose."

--Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (2000), pp. 9, 10.

"[After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, limited warfare among the European states, carried out for reasons of state rather than religion, was the norm until 1789]. This kind of limited warfare [among sovereign states] both made possible and reinforced the Westphalian concept of international order. Before Westphalia, there had still survived something of the medieval concept of authority as being devolved from God through Dantesque gradations...In the second half of the seventeenth century, with the emergence of states whose rulers were both absolute from superior control and immediate to their subjects, a new Newtonian concept came into being, in which order was preserved by the relationship between states themselves, as the order of the universe was preserved by the relationship between the planets. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the preservation of peace came to be seen as the preservation of a balance between powers; a balance that might have to be constantly adjusted by wars. Indeed, an explicit rationale given to Parliament for the maintenance of a standing army in Britain, until the middle of the nineteenth century, was 'the maintenance of the balance of power'. Wars were still seen as a part of the international order, but their conduct had to take account of the balance they were fought to preserve and the settlement with which they were intended to end. The aristocracy might still see war as a normal social activity that needed no justification, but for such 'enlightened' despots' as Frederick II of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria, it was simply a necessary tool in the exercise and preservation of state power; though one now so expensive as to be better avoided. States had an intrinsic right to go to war when they thought it necessary, and state policy was a perfectly adequate jus ad bellum. The great Dutch international lawyer Hugo Grotius, writing during the first half of the seventeenth century, had tried to secularize the doctrine of the just war developed by the Catholic Church, defining the right to go to war in traditional terms of preserving justice and righting wrongs; but his eighteenth-century successor Emer de Vattel taught to wiling ears that such reasoning was irrelevant when both parties believed themselves to be in the right and no superior authority existed to adjudicate between them. What mattered was jus in bello; to conduct war in such a manner as to do the least possible damage to international society as a whole, and make possible the conclusion of a stable peace."

--Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (2000), pp. 23-25.

"Teachers of morals who do not see the difference between the problem of charity within the limits of an accepted social system and the problem of justice between economic groups, holding uneven power within industrial society, have simply not faced the most obvious differences between the morals of groups and those of individuals. The suggestion that the fight against disease is in the same category with the fight against war

reveals the same confusion. Our contemporary culture fails to realise the power, extent and persistence of group egoism in human relations. It may be possible, though it is never easy, to establish just relations between individuals within a group purely by moral and rational suasion and accommodation. In inter-group relations this is practically an impossibility. The relations between groups must therefore always be predominantly

political rather than ethical, that is, they will be determined by the proportion of power which each group possesses at least as much as by any rational and moral appraisal of the comparative needs and claims of each group. The coercive factors, in distinction to the more purely moral and rational factors, in political relations can never be sharply differentiated and defined. It is not possible to estimate exactly how much a party to a

social conflict is influenced by a rational argument or by the threat of force."

--Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), pp. xxii-xxiii

"[E]qual justice is the most rational ultimate objective for society. If [so], a social conflict which aims at greater equality has a moral justification which must be denied to efforts which aim at the perpetuation of privilege. A war for the emancipation of a nation, a race or a class is thus placed in a different moral category from the use of power for the perpetuation of imperial rule or class dominance. The oppressed, whether they be the Indians in the British Empire, or the Negroes in our own country or the industrial workers in every nation, have a higher moral right to challenge their oppressors than these have to maintain their rule by force...equality is a higher social goal than peace. It may never be completely attainable, but it is the symbol for the ideal of a just peace, from the perspective of which every contemporary peace means only an armistice within the existing disproportions of power. It stands for the elimination of the inequalities of power and privilege which are frozen into every contemporary peaceful situation. If social conflict in the past has been futile that has not been due altogether to the methods of violence which were used in it. Violence may tend to perpetuate injustice, even when its aim is justice; but it is important to note that the violence of international wars has usually not aimed at the elimination of an unjust economic system. It has dealt with the real or fancied grievances of nations which were uniformly involved in social injustice. A social conflict which aims at [eliminating] these injustices is in a different category from one which is carried on without reference to the problem of justice. In this respect Marxian philosophy is more true than pacifism. If it may seem to pacifists that the proletarian is perverse in condemning international conflict and asserting the class struggle, the latter has good reason to insist that the elimination of coercion is a futile ideal but that the rational use of coercion is a possible achievement which may save society...of course...any social group engaged in social conflict, may justify itself by professing to be fighting for freedom and equality. [Reason's task is to analyse and assess] such claims and pretensions...Though it will fail in instances where disputes are involved and complex, it is not impossible to discover at least the most

obvious cases of social disinheritance. Wherever a social group is obviously defrauded of its rights, it is natural to give the assertion of its rights a special measure of moral approbation. Indeed this is what is invariably and instinctively done by any portion of the human community which has achieved a degree of impartiality. Oppressed nationalities, Armenians fighting against Turkey, Indians against England, Filipinos against America,

Cubans against Spain, and Koreans against Japan have always elicited a special measure of sympathy and moral approbation from the neutral communities. Unfortunately the working classes in every nation are denied the same measure of sympathy, because there is no neutral community which is as impartial with reference to their claims as with reference to the claims of oppressed nationalities. In the case of the latter there is always some group in nations, not immediately involved in the struggle, which can achieve and afford the luxury of impartiality. Thus Europeans express their sympathy for our disinherited Negroes and Americans have a special degree of interest in the struggle for the emancipation of India."

--Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), pp. 234-6

WHAT IS THE GOAL OF THE WARRING PARTIES INTERNAL TO WAR; OR, WHAT IN GENERAL IS THE MILITARY AIM THAT IS THE MEANS TO ACHIEVING WHATEVER POLITICAL END OCCASIONED WAR?

"War is...an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

--Clausewitz, On War (1976 Howard and Paret translation), p. 75.

"The aim of warfare is to disarm the enemy...If the enemy is to be coerced you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make. The hardships of that situation must not of course be merely transient--at least not in appearance. Otherwise the enemy would not give in but would wait for things to improve. Any change that might be brought about by continuing hostilities must then...be of a kind to bring the enemy still greater disadvantages. The worst of all conditions in which a belligerent can find himself is to be utterly defenseless. Consequently, if you are to force the enemy, by making war on him, to do your bidding, you must either make him literally defenseless or at least put him in a position that makes this danger probable. It follows, then, that to overcome the enemy, or disarm him--call it what you will--must always be the aim of warfare."

--Clausewitz, On War (1976 translation), p. 77.

"But the aim of disarming the enemy (the object of war in the abstract, the ultimate means of accomplishing the war's political purpose, which incorporate all the rest) is in fact not always encountered in reality, and need not be fully achieved as a condition of peace...Many treaties have been concluded before one of the antagonists could be called powerless--even before the balance of power had been seriously altered. What is more, a review of actual cases shows a whole category of wars in which the very idea of defeating the enemy is unreal: those in which the enemy is substantially the stronger power.

"The reason why the object of war that emerges in theory is sometimes inappropriate to actual conflict is that war can be of two very different kinds, a point we discussed in the first chapter. If war were what pure theory postulates, a war between states of markedly unequal strength would be absurd, and so impossible. At most, material disparity could not go beyond the amount that moral factors could replace...But wars have in fact been fought between states of very unequal strength, for actual war is often far removed from the pure concept postulated by theory. Inability to carry on the struggle can, in practice, be replaced by two other grounds for making peace: the first is the improbability of victory; the second is its unacceptable cost."

--Clausewitz, On War (1976 translation), p. 91.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT VIOLATIONS OF THE NORMS OF WAR?

"The Spanish experience [in the Peninsular War of 1808-1813] highlighted [a key] feature of irregular warfare, one grimly depicted in Goya's Disasters of War. The French often refused to regard the [Spanish] guerillas as legitimate combatants, and killed them out of hand when they caught them. The guerrillas responded by butchering their own captives, sometimes in a particularly cruel way. The French in turn replied by burning villages and destroying crops, and distinctions between combatants and non-combatants became blurred. Guerrilla warfare has become synonymous with this sort of brutality, a brutality born of each side's refusal to acknowledge that the other had any right to be fighting at all. It certainly did not start in Spain: nor, alas, was it to end there...The Germans [during their invasion of France in 1870] denied French irregulars the status of legitimate combatants. 'We are hunting them down pitilessly', wrote [German Chancellor] Bismarck to his wife: 'they are not soldiers: we are treating them as murderers.' "

--John Keegan and Richard Holmes, Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle (1985), pp. 242-3